unit two the gift of giftgiving

1、unit twothe gift of gift-givinganthony brandti dated a woman for a while literary type, well-read, lots of books in her place whom i admired a bit to extravagantly, and one christmas i decided to give her something unusually nice and, im afraid, unusually expensive. i bought her a set of swifts work

2、s not just any set but a scarce early eighteenth-century edition; then i wrapped each leather-bound volume separately and made a card for each volume, each card containing a carefully chose quotation from swift himself. i thought it was terribly romantic; i had visions of her opening the set, volume

3、 by volume, while we sat by the fire christmas eve sipping cognac and listening to the brandenburg concertos.how stupid i am sometimes! she, practical woman that i should have known she was, had bought me two pairs of socks and a shirt, plus a small volume of poems by a. r. ammons. she cried when sh

4、e opened the swift. i thought they were tears of joy, but they werent. “ i cant accept this,” she said. “ its totally out of proportion.” she insisted that i take the books back or sell them or keep them for myself. when i protested she just got more upset, and finally she asked me to leave and to t

5、ake the books with me. hurt and perplexed, i did. we stopped seeing each other soon after that. it took me weeks to figure out what i had done wrong. “theres a goat in all of us,” r. p. blackmur wrote somewhere, “ a stupid, stubborn goat.”to my credit, im normally more perspicacious about the gifts

6、i give, and less of a show-off. but i have it in me, obviously, to be, as my ex-girlfriend said, totally out of proportion: to give people things i cant afford, or things that betoken an intimacy that doesnt exist, or things that bear no relation to the interests or desires of the person im giving t

7、hem to. ive kicked myself too often not to know its there, this insensitivity to the niceties of gift-giving.the niceties, of course, not the raw act of giving ( and certainly not the thought) are what count. in most cultures, most of them more sensible than our own, the giving of gifts is highly ri

8、tualistic- that is, it is governed by rules and regulations; it is under strict social control. it is also, more or less explicitly, an exchange. none of this giving with no thought of receiving; on the contrary, you give somebody something and you expect something back in return maybe not right awa

9、y but soon enough. and it is expected to be of more or less equivalent value; you can be fairly certain that nobody is going to one-up you with something really extravagant like a scarce set of swift, or else turn greedy on you and give you a penny whistle in return for a canoe. and once thats under

10、 control, the giving and receiving of gifts is free to become ceremonious, an occasion for feasting and celebration. you can finish your cognacs, in other words , and get down to the real business of the evening.gift-giving involves the expectation of reciprocity therefore, but we wise men of the we

11、stern world avoid this fact: we paper it over with rhetoric about selflessness, about how much better it is to give than to receive. “ an honorable benefactor never thinks on the good turn he does,” wrote seneca nearly two thousand years ago. indeed. the honorable, the noble thing to do, we like to

12、tell ourselves, is to give it and forget it, to expect nothing at all in return, not even gratitude. to give freely, spontaneously, like nature in her abundance. like some happy hooker who neglects to charge her customers. like gods own fool.ive given some thought to my own proclivities in this matt

13、er and have concluded that even at my most ridiculously generous, my most spontaneously giving, i expect something in return as much as the next man does. im trying literally to buy something: affection, maybe love. someones admiration. or to establish my chosen identity as a romantic, capable of ma

14、king the grand gesture. or to inspire guilt: see, ive thought hard and gone to a lot of trouble to get you what you might want, to penetrate to your heart and give it its desire. have you done the same for me? my girlfriend saw through all this right away. as i said, it took me weeks.the niceties. w

15、hat are the niceties? i used to think there were no niceties, that the thought really was all that counted. i might have gotten this from my mother, who every christmas spent exactly the same amount of money on my brother and me no favorite sons in this household and made sure we knew it. my mother

16、seldom wrapped gifts, or if she did, she used the cheapest possible tissue paper and no ribbons. we had no-frills birthdays, a no-frills christmas. i forgot her birthday once, even after she had dropped numerous hints that it was imminent, and she made me feel quite ashamed about it. the overall les

17、son was that you remembered you might give foolish things, but you remembered and you gave generously; there was always an abundance of presents. but you didnt have to wrap them, and cards were unnecessary. she had a puritan mentality. decoration was frivolous.i havent gone quite to the other extrem

18、e, but eighteenth-century literature aside it now seems to me that decoration is most of it. when i first started living with my wife and we began giving each other things, as lovers are wont to do, it gradually came out that most of her previous boyfriends were, shall we say, unimaginative when it

19、came to gifts. one of them gave her a salad spinner for christmas, a baked ham for her birthday. why not a broom? why not a months supply of bread? with one exception, nobody had given her flowers since she was in high school, and that was more than a few years ago. i didnt need to be told twice. sh

20、e got flowers on easter sunday, which was the first major occasion we shared together, and they were delivered, which is definitely the best way to get flowers. she got flowers this last birthday. she gets flowers sometimes for no reason at all. she cries every time, but these tears are tears of joy

21、.im not bragging: any idiot could see how to win this womans heart. she told me how; she was explicit about it. my point is not what a swell fellow i am, its the flowers. theyre nothing but decoration. theyre entirely useless; in my allergy-prone family, the can even cause discomfort. but theyre an

22、ideal gift. purely symbolic. purely clich. we want those clichs. we want what everybody wants: the timeless, unchangeable gestures; the rituals; the beautiful wrapping paper; the ribbons-ironed, no less, and chosen to go with the color of the paper. im abandoning, slowly, my wish to surprise her, to

23、 find some fabulous object she hadnt thought of but would instantly see is just right for her. its an ego trip: im so clever, so thoughtful, so imaginative that i know her mind better than she knows it herself. im giving it up. and im things that seem to me tacky or unneeded or that wont last the wa

24、y i like things to last. and for the really important things, the jewelry she will keep and wear all her life, we now go shopping together. the jewelry, please take note, is decoration. im beginning to take her to rare-book shops so she can buy me what i want for christmas. more decoration. you dont

25、 read rare books, you shelve them. she thinks theyre silly, but she goes along with me . and why not? we pamper each other. we dont have the nerve to pamper ourselves.theres precious little genuine altruism in the world. there are professional altruists, its true nurses, social workers, all these so

26、-called “ helping professions” but they get paid to dispense their services; as for governmental largess, ask any welfare recipient whether its given freely or grudgingly. even institutionalized giving is a kind of exchange: some kind of payoff is expected. during my years with sherman fairchild i s

27、pent some time working for his philanthropic foundation; my job was to find worthy projects to which fairchild might donate a few of his millions. the experience taught me a great deal about the power of money, the power of the gift. everywhere i went, and that was all over the country, potential do

28、nees treated me with a respect far out of proportion to my callow abilities. talk about ego trips: deans of medical schools asked for my opinions and advice; presidents of universities invited me to tea; the then director of the national institutes of health gave me an hour of his time. at one unive

29、rsity a department chairman even asked me to write a critique of his department, which he then distributed to his faculty. i tried to tell all these people that i could only make recommendations, that i had no power to decide on contributions. but it made no difference; i was in demand.none of the a

30、bove, however, caught my interest; that belonged to cesar chavez, whom i met on the ninth day of his famous fast as he lay in his austere room in the farm-workers center in delano, california, watching the sunlight fade. i had never encountered so much charisma before, and i was overwhelmed. but fai

31、rchild would have none of it. a small grant for their health center? no way. too controversial. i spent months trying to help raise money for chavez at other foundations. not a dime. foundation money goes to university or hospital buildings, which then get named after the donors; to fellowships or p

32、rofessorial chairs, similarly named ; to museums, which thoughtfully chisel the names of major donor on the walls. money buys prestige. foundation executives talk about their gifts as “investments” and look for a return of sorts, for the kind of success in a project or program they can then point to

33、 and call “mine.” some of them wind up thinking very well of themselves indeed.yet joe delaney, the football player, gave his life trying to save two drowning boys. my parents gave up a great deal in the way of material comfort so that my brother and i could go to cornell and princeton. some people

34、regularly give blood; its anonymous, a gift for which they receive no credit, and it temporarily weakens them. as soon as one becomes cynical about the possibility of altruism, counterinstances come to mind. we live in tension between the possibility of altruism and the reality of egoism. and whiche

35、ver way we lean, we ultimately want to think well of ourselves.i dont suppose im really a cynic; my wife tells me im more of an ironist. maybe so. look into human motivation long enough, i am convinced, and you come away unwell to take anything at face value. but that doesnt necessarily destroy your

36、 faith in human nature. i think most of us want to get beyond our selfish. we want to give; beneath the neuroses, the compulsions, the fears, anxieties, desires, the self-pity, we harbor generous impulses, spontaneous warmth. there is much good nature in the human animal. “as a general rule, people, even the wicked,” wrote dostoyevsky, “ are much more nave and simple-hearted than we suppose. and we